The 6th labour. Dispersing the Stymphalian birds, with Silvia Scanavini, Claudio Benzoni, Massimo De Caria and Gino Lucente

The project L’Arte è una fatica inutile continues its journey through the myth with the sixth labour: Dispersing the Stymphalian birds, scheduled for Sunday 24 May 2026 at the Civico Museo Parisi Valle in Maccagno.
This is neither a staging of the classical tale nor a narrative updating of it. The myth is taken as an operating structure, a field of tension in which practices, relationships, actions and drifts can emerge. The twelve labours of Hercules thus become a working device: a sequence of trials that activate the collective body of art, unsettling the distinction between production, care, conservation and presence.

The whole project is built around the figure of a vulnerable Ercole, removed from heroic monumentality and brought back to an unstable, exposed, almost processual dimension. Restoration does not act as a simple conservation practice but as an exercise in relationship; care becomes an act of continuous negotiation between material, time and community.

The sixth labour takes shape from the Stymphalian birds: metallic, noisy, invasive presences. No longer mythological creatures to be fought, but images of a permanent disturbance. Their flight breaks the order of space and introduces a state of widespread instability. Dispersal then becomes an ambiguous gesture: not the elimination of conflict but its propagation. Through interventions and shared practices, the project works on disturbance as a possibility for transformation, and on crossing as a necessary condition for producing new forms of relationship between bodies, places and languages.